Gotti and the Cult of the Tomato

Ever hear of Gotti? Don’t worry if the answer is ‘no’ to that question – it doesn’t seem like most people have heard of this movie. It’s a crime drama biopic that looks at the life of real-life mob boss John Gotti Sr. It went through absolute development hell since 2010, going through several directors and cast changes with rather controversial results. It eventually found its team with John Travolta to star and Kevin Connolly as director.

Actually, while I’m here, I highly, highly recommend looking into this film’s background. What was sold as a biopic of John Gotti’s son, John Gotti Jr, eventually ended up focusing on his father instead. It had four different titles and 44 different producers. And the guy who originally bought the movie rights was revealed to have pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 2002. Joe Pesci gained 30 pounds for his role, later had his salary cut and his role shrunk, and sued them; this was settled out of court and he since left the project. Their main financier is currently sitting in prison awaiting charges of fraud. There were four different directors, from Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook, My Sister’s Keeper), to Barry Levinson (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam) to Joe Johnson (Captain America: The First Avenger, October Sky). We ended up with the dude from Entourage. Al Pacino was involved at some point. It’s nuts!

We’re not here to talk about those controversies, however. We’re here to talk about their latest controversy. Gotti’s marketing team took advantage of their Rotten Tomatoes score with an audience rating of 80% and a critical score of 0% on their opening weekend. Their official Twitter account hit people with a tweet saying

“Who do you trust more? Yourself or a troll behind a keyboard?”

This “War on the Critics” angle is quite interesting, considering the movie never had any press screenings. Its 0% was based on 36 reviews and a lot of them came from the film’s premiere at Cannes. It also failed to really make a splash even with the notoriety, as it suffered a 53% drop off on its second week, making only a $4 million return. There are accusations that a lot of the accounts that upvoted the movie were created a month before the film’s premiere. This suggests that this was all manufactured for marketing purposes. Rotten Tomatoes has denied any wrongdoing, however, in any case, the audience rating has dropped down to 56% at the time of writing.

This whole controversy raises a bigger problem, and that’s how Rotten Tomatoes is used in terms of evaluating a film’s quality. This isn’t the only time RT’s score was used in marketing to create this ‘critics vs fans’ mentality, of course. Dwayne Johnson rather infamously did it to promote Baywatch. The site’s audience score is being used to counter positive or negative receptions to movies in common discourse.

This ‘audience vs critics’ thing is really very silly and cynical. The guys who made Gotti don’t really care if critics hate their movie or not; they want bums on seats, simple as. The problem is that people are buying into this false dichotomy and using RT as a quasi-battleground for whether a movie is worth watching or not.

And I don’t think it’s really fair to place that kind of significance onto Rotten Tomatoes. Or use this distaste for their ratings to make it out like critics aren’t fans of film and do not genuinely enjoy the craft. But while I think this is overblown, I do think there’s a bit too much significance put on the site. It strips a hell of a lot of nuance from a critic’s opinions, and their aggregate operates in a way that rewards films that can get lukewarm praise. Your Certified Fresh if a lot of the reviews just hit 60%. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

And I get the function of RT; I see its uses. There’s a better way of viewing their results than dogmatically defending your chosen movie over a high or low score. I just think people need to stop putting so much personal stake in how these aggregates go. At the end of the day, it’s an impartial round-up of thousands of reviews. Rotten Tomatoes really doesn’t care that you don’t think a film is as good and as bad as their percentage indicates.

I guess this does hold up a couple of truisms of the modern age. The internet loves to strip nuance out of everything, and nobody cares what critics think. At least not to the point where their thoughts are collected up with those of dozen to thousands of their peers and given a fruit put next to them (Or is it a vegetable?).

If there’s anything to learn from this, it’s that it’s really not that big a deal if you like or dislike a movie with a high/low RT score. Critical consensus on a film never really stopped people from liking and hating them before, so why stop now? And marketing teams can stop taking advantage of this outrage to try to promote their crappy films. Movies like Gotti live and die on their own merits. I cannot say for certain what those merits are as I have not seen the movie. And why would I? Didn’t you see; it has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes…

Daniel writes about movies. A lot. Maybe too much, perhaps, but he has not been stopped. Yet...His more specified interests would be in comic book, and maybe something not related to comic books once he thinks about it, he swears. Is a general fountain of incredibly useless knowledge, but don't think he'd be a surefire in a table quiz.